Another award for Red Brick

Red Brick Systems has announced that Premier, Inc was honoured as a winner in the "Best Applications for Data Warehousing" category of the 1998 Best Practices in Data Warehousing Awards Competition hosted by The Data Warehousing Institute. Another Red Brick customer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, was named overall winner. Premier, Inc, the largest healthcare alliance enterprise in the US, was recognised for Market Vantage, its innovative healthcare application that enables hospitals to access detailed healthcare data to make decisions that increase overall efficiency. Red Brick is represented in South Africa by Software Futures, a Computer Configurations Holdings company. Premier provides hospitals and healthcare systems across the nation with products and services designed to help them reduce costs, develop integrated delivery systems, manage technology and share knowledge. Market Vantage, using a MicroStrategy front-end tool, gives Premier`s members the ability to analyse large volumes of comparative medical data stored in Red Brick Warehouse. Using Market Vantage, Premier and its members can quickly recognise how they perform both financially and medically as compared to other hospitals nationwide. "With the globalisation of business and the demand for faster access to larger quantities of information, data warehousing is playing an increasingly important role in overall business operations," said Pete Bird, director of marketing for Premier. "This is especially true in healthcare, where we need to have access to comparative information from disparate sources in order to manage both cost and care as well as plan strategically. Using Red Brick and MicroStrategy, we`ve been able to reduce our administrative costs while improving the ability to access business-critical information, which benefits our member hospitals. This integrated solution has reduced the technical burden on our systems staff and presented us with a scalable model for expanding our business of providing comparative medical information. With Market Vantage, we can help our member hospitals quickly assess their business performance and find ways to improve overall healthcare for their communities." Premier`s Market Vantage is used by many of the more than 1 800 member hospitals nationwide to make better decisions and improve competitive advantage. Hospitals can quickly retrieve detailed analyses of their performance in various practices in order to identify how to improve outcomes or reduce costs. Data from the National Database of all Medicare Discharges and All-Payer Data from 28 states is combined in the Red Brick database to provide atomic-level data from a single interface. The data is used to analyse hospital efficiency, market share, quality of care, patient demographics and physician profiles. The ability to return reports to member hospitals in a matter of seconds has provided a significant competitive advantage to both Premier and the member hospitals.